A note from John Pendergast, a member of the ACCL, and his company, Enough. To learn moe about his company please visit http://enoughproject.org.
Ten short years ago, my dear friend Gayle Smith and I launched the Enough Project, calling upon the decades of experience we had accrued working in Africa and on U.S. policy towards Africa. Our overly ambitious goal was nothing less than contributing to an end to genocide and other mass atrocities in the region of East and Central Africa, to which we had dedicated the bulk of our adult lives.
Well, ten years later, mass atrocities are still being committed in this region. But we have learned a lot. We know that when the root causes are properly identified, when grassroots activism generates political will, and when the right policies are implemented, change can happen. To help explain, we worked with our friends at VICE to create Enough’s new video.
Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned over the past decade is that one of the core reasons that these conflicts continue is that the incentive structures heavily favor deadly violence and mass corruption over peace and good governance. Small networks of leaders and their commercial collaborators have hijacked many of the governments in East and Central Africa and are enriching themselves by exploiting